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When Spidey Met Oracle	By : littleblackduck Category: zMisplaced Stories [ADMIN use only] > Spiderman Views: 37996 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: The Spider-Man universe and characters are owned by Marvel. The Oracle universe and characters are owned by DC. I make no profit from this work. This is a sequel to "When Spidey Met Batgirl." I think you should read that first, but that might just be

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
CHAPTER TWELVE: Getting Down to Business
Even in the ancient days when the Titans ruled the world, the strands of eternity had long been the dominion of the Moirai.
And even now, as both the Warrior Princess of the Amazons and the Lion of Olympus could attest to the various superhero teams they had served in this modern age, even the mightiest mortals of earth were still mere marionettes whose strings were pulled by the Fates of myth.
Clotho, the spinner, spun out the thread of every lifeline, while Lachesis, the measurer, divined the length of each and every human life until Atropos, who could not be turned, snipped that bit of cord when the time had come so it could be woven into the great Tapestry of Destiny.
In the last few millennia or so, however, bored by the seeming fickleness of their collective choices, the Fates had decided that there would be mortals privy to their weaving... Seers and prognosticators who may walk and warn worthy heroes of their woeful pattern in the infinite knitting of the Kindly Ones... Perhaps even change it if they proved righteous...
Despite her rather presumptive choice of nom de guerre in her post-Batgirl career, Barbara Gordon was not such an oracle. In all honesty, the Moirai were a little put out by her decision to declare herself as such, especially since her choice to do so was borne of an outlandish belief, despite all evidence to the contrary, that this foolish slip of a girl -- so much like that pompous Athena -- was somehow in charge of her own fortune... That with enough knowledge she could serve the purpose of the Fates herself.
As it so happened, Julia Carpenter -- the second heroine to call herself Spider-Woman before she decided to champion the cause of good as Arachne -- had actually been the most recent mortal vessel to be blessed with precognition. Julia could glimpse the vast, thrumming Web of Life interwoven within Destiny's Tapestry when they saw fit for her to do so. That this new Madame Web had a passing resemblance to the Gordon woman had never escaped The Fates, and they delighted in this irony the same way they delighted in making Carpenter attendant to the ever-evolving providence of Peter Parker, the current warden of The Web... The same man whose lifeline would intersect with the specious Miss Gordon's when she least expected or wanted... as they had decreed long before either of them had been born.
Even their chosen seer could only get some fleeting sense of the breadth of the intricate machinations the Kindly Ones had outlined for Barbara and Peter, but on one particular morning, Julia got a brief flash of how The Web might bind them together once more:
Barbara Gordon was coming to New York City. If she met Peter Parker in the thirty-seven hours she spent on the isle of Manhattan, it would pervert the course of Spider-Man's life inextricably.
If this happened, it would occur on a Wednesday. In the few months Carpenter had possessed the intermittent clairvoyance Cassandra Webb had passed on to her briefly before Kraven the Hunter's deranged wife, Sasha, killed the elderly psychic, the new Madame Web had noticed that the big things -- the things she tended to be warned about -- always seemed to happen on Wednesdays...
What struck her this time was the unwavering conviction that she couldn't do anything to change things.
Usually, Madame Web was presented with some vague notion of one precious moment that she could advise Spider-Man to avoid or realize or choose that could render the outcome of greater events. Most times, somehow, there was something that the two of them could do to re-weave The Web, but this time the Fates were clear...
You cannot alter this anymore than he, three old and timeless voices whispered in Madame Web's mind. Whether the Spider will meet the false prophet is ours to decide, oracle, and afterwards... Oh! Afterwards...
*
Barbara couldn't explain the sense of dread she felt as she rolled through the doors of Horizon Labs, but it had settled heavily upon her shoulders and showed little sign of lifting. It certainly couldn't have been any misgivings she harbored about Max Modell or his scientific hub at New York's South Street Seaport. As far as she knew, they were beyond reproach. So Barbara had to assume it was because she just hated business stuff. And why wouldn't she? Business stuff sucked. If she'd been looking to juggle high-finance corporate concerns, she certainly wouldn't have chosen library sciences as a major in college. At the same time, she probably wouldn't have ended up living with her dad again right after she graduated, either. The tragedy in all this, as far as her singular undergrad business class instructor had seen it, was that Barbara had the mind for it.
That didn't mean she liked it.
Once she'd fallen under Batman's financial umbrella after he'd finally accepted her as Batgirl, Barbara gleefully figured she'd never have to worry about any of that ever again. Her father had been vehemently opposed to her pursuing a law enforcement career within either the GCPD or the FBI, but in the Dark Knight's sponsorship of her as the Dominoed Daredoll, she'd been able to realize her life's ambition. Barbara Gordon was solving crimes and saving lives and decided right then that she'd never use Bruce Wayne's money for rent or personal expenses. No, that had been earmarked for the Caped Crusade. She figured her job at the library would cover all that other stuff anyway, and if Batman was providing her with crime-fighting equipment, what else could she really need?
Again, she'd been young and not nearly as smart as she thought way back then, but looking at the way things were now, given the Batman, Inc. business model, Babs couldn't help but figure she'd sparked the notion of franchising the brand way more than Dick Grayson ever had.
Things had changed for Barbara after the Joker's assault, of course. The Wayne Foundation had been adamant about paying her medical expenses and anything else to get her back on her feet, so to speak. Officially, this was all out of respect for her father, a dedicated public servant to the city of Gotham, a man and a family that Bruce Wayne believed in -- but Barbara could tell that Batman felt guilty, and she could only allow that to go so far... After a while it all just felt too much like charity to a girl who'd known the risks going in.
And so, that fantasy of ignoring the financial side of life died the death of all impetuous dreams of youth... Especially when her focus shifted to data mining and analysis. WayneTech had some great cutting edge stuff if your focus was swinging from rooftops or taking down psychotic killers in non-lethal ways, but if you wanted pure processing power maintained by high frequency dual-bus architecture, there were better options. Better options she wasn't going to ask Bruce to pay for. So Barbara learned how to manage her money so she could fund her new crime-fighting endeavors, but it still never became something she particularly enjoyed.
And it certainly didn't mean she was prepared to negotiate a deal of this scale with Horizon.
When she first ventured out to build herself up as Oracle, it was always under the sly guise that she was just trying to build a killer home set-up... not much of a lie then, when you thought about it... At the levels she initially found herself wheeling and dealing, that was the kind of thing you could get a fellow techie at some retail outlet to respond to in a positive way. There was always that thrilling sense of one-upmanship.
"You're going to try to use the new Horizon Nth-alloy heat sinks with a Digitronix processor? Well, how about I knock 20% off if you tell me how that works out for you..."
Now with this ro-bat upgrade project, Lucius Fox had her bidding on software for an entire multinational conglomerate. That was different. That was pure competition. There wasn't much wiggle room for awe in this kind of negotiation. It was all about stopping the next guy from beating you, right?
"WayneTech wants to license my software for their marginally-sanctioned, non-profit defense contract?" she could imagine Max Modell, the big wig at Horizon asking. "What kind of returns are we going to see on that investment?"
It didn't help that this robot-batmen thing had been a back burner project for Barbara. Lucius had been all gung ho about setting it up a week after he first mentioned it, but then serious business got in the way. Internet 3.0 was just barely prepped for general release and then all hell broke loose for Batman, Incorporated. The press had finally dropped the whole "Batman of Manhattan" thing -- even though Barbara knew that Bruce still hadn't found one -- but by that point, their private war with Leviathan had escalated.
Bruce, Dick, Tim and Damian had been lured to a seemingly abandoned oil tanker on international waters that turned out to be Doctor Dedalus' ultimate death trap: an elaborate spider's web to ensnare even the Batman's untiring, leathery wings. The four of them would have probably been left at the bottom of the ocean if Oracle hadn't been able to launch a fleet of ro-bats to lift the sinking ship out of the murky depths.
So, as one could imagine, the presentation for Modell had become one more thing Barbara was scrambling to piece together when she wasn't busy with serious Batman, Inc. business or her missions with the Birds of Prey. And in those few free moments she did have to work on it, Barbara was so focused on perfecting the software patch and developing a business prospectus -- which wasn't really her strong suit -- that she'd never gotten around to re-familiarizing herself with Horizon Labs as a whole.
Maybe some part of her was still waiting for Bruce to bail her out of this nonsense. After Leviathan had made its first direct strike, she'd assumed Bruce would re-allocate his pertinent resources now that he realized the threat they were facing was led by Talia Al'Ghul, the daughter of his most ruthless enemy and the mother of his son, Damian.
"Leviathan will work itself out in due time," Bruce had told her once they'd recovered. "You still know me well enough to know that I have a plan, don't you?"
"Of course," she assured him... and moreover herself. "But now that we know who's behind Leviathan, I just thought working this was more important than the WayneTech cover story with Lucius Fox we worked up for the Internet 3.0 stuff..."
"Nice try, Barbara," Bruce said. "You've still got work in the morning. If we're going to beat Talia, I need better ro-bats."
"Great," she muttered.
"Leviathan's invisible because it's legion," he explained seriously. "We need to start isolating and tracking her agents. That means putting names to some of these faces. State-of-the-art facial recognition software in the ro-bats could make all the difference. We might just need that edge to win."
Bruce had suggested that this annoying little trip to New York could be a nice little vacation from the storm that was coming, but honestly, it wasn't the doom and gloom of Batman, Inc.'s war with Leviathan that had been getting to Barbara.
Yes, Leviathan's assault had been terrible and harrowing, but the sad fact of it was, Babs was used to all of that. Fearing that the people she loved were all about to die at the hands of some terrible, global conspiracy shrouded in secrets and shadows was just another Wednesday for her. That day with Doctor Dedalus might have been a little more intense than she was used to, but it's not like she needed a break from all that. If anything, Barbara felt like she should have been back at work, helping Bruce puzzle this mystery out...
No. It was the daily grind at WayneTech that she needed to escape for a while. All those ten hour days under the harsh glare of fluorescent lighting with Lucius Fox hounding her twice a day for tedious paperwork and that kid in the cubicle across from her, Hiram Riddley, rambling on and on about ten-year-old episodes of Wendy the Werewolf Stalker. A girl could only take so much.
Somehow, the worst of both worlds managed to bleed together with this "vacation" of hers. It was the epitome of cog-in-the-corporate-machine responsibility, while still somehow integral to Batman's greater agenda in a way she couldn't control. She suspected that was part of Bruce's plan all along. There was undoubtedly a point to all this, but it still sucked.
Besides, there wasn't much she could do about any of that now.
Barbara had worked out how to integrate Horizon's Suspect Identification System into the ro-bat offensive programming, so she could probably just wing it. Maybe she was totally stressing over this whole presentation needlessly. Everyone told her she worried too much. Everybody except Bruce. It's just that when Barbara went anywhere, she liked to know everything she was dealing with, a consequence of life in a wheelchair.
Sure, she knew Max Modell. Who didn't? Modell was one of those guys who built personal computers in his garage back in the 80's. The difference between him, Wozniak, Gates and Jobs is that when he got bored with homemade PCs, he went on to construct a primitive Purple Ray projector powered by a cheap and dirty arc reactor. He eventually took all that money he'd initially made from computers to start up Horizon Labs, where he'd nurtured some of the greatest young scientific minds on the planet over the years. His former employees included the likes of Michael Holt and Silas Stone and even a few child prodigies. Brilliant prepubescents like Uatu Jackson.
Jackson had been the focus of Barbara's research on the current staff at Horizon, as she had wanted to learn as much as she could about the kid who'd created this software Lucius was so desperate to purchase. She hadn't, however, found the time to check out the rest of Modell's employees, and while she probably didn't really need to in order to pull off this deal, Babs was a born over-achiever.
So she tried to focus on what she did know as she signed in with reception. Besides her familiarity with Max and her background on Uatu, she had what she'd picked up doing a cursory web search with her smartphone during the drive over from Bruce's private hangar in Teterboro that morning.
The lab had been going through their own issues lately, mostly with City Hall. Apparently, the mayor's son, Colonel John Jameson, had become involved in Horizon's Apogee Space Station project. The Colonel had been one of NASA's top astronauts, so his work on the lab's privately funded space exploration initiative should have been a bonus, but they'd faced a few hiccups. Spencer Smythe, the Spider-Slayer, had used the launch of the Vertex shuttle as an avenue to take revenge upon Mayor Jameson. The Vertex made it to Apogee thanks to a heroic effort on the part of the New Avengers, but weeks later, there'd been a mishap on the station itself that the Future Foundation had helped clear up.
All of this had resulted in some sudden friction with municipal resources, with the mayor publicly stating that the work performed at Horizon Labs presented a imminent threat to the City of New York, even going so far as to cut off their power. Babs was sure her own father could understand the impulse, in theory if not in practice, as she knew how protective the Commissioner had been of her since her injury. At the same time, Dad had never tried to abuse his authority to take her out of harm's way... because he knew she'd never forgive him. Mayor Jameson showed no kind of similar restraint, though, but it wasn't like Max Modell and his team had been idle during this brief interruption of normal operation. Horizon's staff had taken the Zenith, their mobile sea-lab, into international waters while they helped provide tech support for the Avengers' efforts against the Sinister Six's recent global assault.
Barbara couldn't imagine that Jameson's issues with Modell and his crew were helped by the fact that so many of their recent headlines seemed so centered on... on a certain New York based superhero she herself had been avoiding for the last several months. The lab had been designated the new CDC during the spider-virus epidemic, and not including those run-ins with Smythe and the Sinister Six, there'd been a number of incidents involving meta-criminals like the Hobgoblin and the Lizard -- all of whom had a certain web-swinging do-gooder in common.
She almost had to wonder...
"Ah, Miss Gordon," Max greeted her shortly after her security screening. "Always a pleasure."
Max Modell was a great big bear of a man, but there was always this twinkle of gentle kindness in his eyes. Barbara had been avoiding this meeting for so long she had actually forgotten how much she used to enjoy visiting this place back in the day.
"You look fantastic!" Max told her. "How long has it been? Since Clocktower Systems launched out in Platinum Flats?"
"Actually, Horizon did some work on Kord Tower, but you were on vacation, I think," she said. "My circumstances have changed since then."
"So, I'm aware," Modell tutted. "WayneTech, Miss Gordon? How utterly pedestrian. Let me show you something..."
As she followed Max through the Atrium, Horizon's social hub where employees were encouraged to gather and converse with their fellow scientists, she got brief snippets of the kinds of conversations she dreamed of having during her undergrad years.
"I just don't buy into this 'Infinite Earth' model of the multiverse. If Oa's the center of the galaxy, and the Milky Way's roughly 200 million light years from the Great Attractor, the notion that this planet is somehow the lynch pin to all meta-universal interpenetrating dimensions is the height of human hubris..."
"...you're seriously trying to tell me that you prefer Ray Palmer's miniaturization methodology to Hank Pym's...?"
"...it's a quantum leap in the realization of virtual reality within a practical information network in the least, but the greater implication is that the Internet 3.0 might be the first step to the Bose-Einstein quantum computer..."
It was a marvelous thing to wander through.
"I love that," Modell said to her suddenly.
"Me too," Barbara smiled. "You've got an amazing set of people working here, Mr. Modell."
"Not them," Max corrected. "You."
"What?"
"The way you always light up when you're here, Miss Gordon," he said, leading her into a secured wing she'd never been to before. "Like I've always said, I think you'd be a good fit here."
"What is this, Max?" Barbara asked, following him down a long corridor to a door marked LAB 6.
"This is the research and development division," he explained."My private think tank. Seven interdependent labs where my best and brightest do their thing. There's an opening right now, if you're interested."
"You don't need any more IT support than you've already got, Mr. Modell," she sighed. "For godsakes, Max, you're the guy in charge. I mean..."
"I know, I know," he groaned. "Every computer you've used since high school was a Horizon model, right? Sheesh... Why do you kids insist on making me feel old?"
"Sorry," she smirked.
"That's okay, because I'm not talking IT for a computer scientist of your caliber," he said. "There's an open spot on the research team now. The Lucky Seven, I like to call it. I could set you up right here and you could do whatever you want, Barbara. We've all taken a glimpse at that Internet 3.0. release candidate WayneTech sent out last week. It's pretty impressive... and it's got your fingerprints all over it."
"Internet 3.0's a WayneTech patent," she said uneasily.
"And I'd never dream of infringing upon it," Max assured her. "I can't imagine what you'd come up with if you weren't held back by Bruce Wayne's corporate agenda. Direct neural interfacing? Next generation artificial intelligence? One of my employees is on the verge of a breakthrough creating three-dimensional photonic crystals from an exotic material that could revolutionize communications technologies, especially if we had the right kind of forward-thinking computer scientist on site..."
"You're telling me you don't have any idea what to do with that kind of thing, Mr. Modell?" Barbara scoffed.
"I'm old school," he smirked. "I made the kind of computers the young folks remember using in high school. Besides, I didn't build these labs for me. I made them to give the next generation of innovators their chance to build the future. If you want to change the world a little more, I'd be happy to give you the resources to do so. This particular lab was home to one of the world's foremost hematologists, but it could easily be retrofitted for your fields of interest..."
"I'm happy where I am, Max," she said.
Immediately after making this statement, Barbara realized that it was true.
As much as she'd initially bristled at the situation, she actually enjoyed going to work in the Wayne Enterprise Complex. She kind of liked all that back and forth between her and Lucius Fox. She appreciated being humbled when he was right and she was wrong, thrived by the challenge of it. Babs even had a soft spot for that nerd, Ridley. She was starting to suspect that WayneTech might be the only thing that might keep her from ending up like Bruce.
Don't get her wrong, Barbara loved Bruce Wayne. Not in some gross puppy dog way, but in a real, inspiring way. She loved everything he was willing to sacrifice to make Gotham City the dream he had in his heart... because what Bruce was willing to give up had inevitably become his heart itself. He would never spare himself a thousand and one nights of dark ugliness and probably the loss of his family's fortune, and he was starting to become that soulless monster he'd been keeping at bay within -- the same one so many people thought he'd already become. Batman was too smart not to realize that saving Gotham meant the loss of every last trace of the little boy Thomas and Martha brought into the world. So were she and Alfred and Dick and Tim and hopefully Damian.
Barbara didn't know about the rest, but she figured that initial revelation was when Dick quit being Robin to find his own way as Nightwing. There was a part of her that always regretted that she hadn't gone with him -- that feared her continued loyalty to Bruce and his singular mission was one of the wedges between them -- but she'd stayed because she convinced herself there was some angle to Batman's mad, desperate quest that she just wasn't seeing. Something that would save Bruce Wayne's soul as well as the city he'd champion to the end, but now, after all these years, she'd been working toward his impossible dream just too long to see it ending any other way...
She could live with that if he could. And Barbara had little doubt that Bruce Wayne -- selfless, generous, so ultimately kind Bruce -- could live with that... But she wanted more for herself. When Bruce was done -- when Barbara Gordon was done supporting him and his mission -- she wanted to be able to take everything he'd taught her out into the world and maintain his legacy... on a grander scale.
Barbara knew that the only way she could do that was if she stuck with Lucius Fox for as long as he'd put up with her. Because like her dad and Bruce and even Amanda frikkin' Waller, Fox had things to teach Barbara about how the world worked. Things she couldn't glean working under Max Modell's light touch.
"Members of the think tank are afforded the kind of autonomy here that I can't imagine you've enjoyed with Wayne Enterprises," Modell tempted, continuing his pitch. "The salary is more than competitive... and honestly, after some of the setbacks we've faced with some former employees, I'd really like to place someone I can trust in this lab, Miss Gordon."
"I appreciate the offer, Max, really," she told him, "but I belong in Gotham right now."
"Whatever you say," he sighed. "You understand, though, I had to try. I just hope Bruce Wayne knows how lucky he is to have you."
"He does, Max." And for the first time in her life, Barbara didn't doubt it.
"Fine, be that way," he smiled. "Come along, now, Miss Gordon. Let's head next door so I can introduce you to the kind of brilliant young man you don't want for a coworker..."
*
Goddamn did Sajani Jaffrey hate Peter Parker.
Sajani had been working in Lab 2 at Horizon for almost three years, so she'd encountered her fair share of brilliant assholes. Hell, Michael Morbius, the unrepentant supervillain Max had working out of Lab 6 until recently had actually taken a bite out of her a week or so back. And yet, there was something about Parker that had really worked its way right under her skin.
Sajani wasn't all that surprised. The people who ended up in Lab 7 had a long-standing history of pissing her off. When she first started, Ryan Choi had quickly become the bane of her working day. After Choi skipped out for a professorship at Ivy University, it'd been Serling Roquette, whose work in recombinant extra-terrestrial genetics had consistently butted heads with Sajani's own research into xeno-biology. While Sajani had been focusing on Kree and Daxamite technology during the five months Roquette had occupied Lab 7, she'd always worried that there was only room for one xenologist at Horizon and Max was just waiting to see who came up with the best tech before he ousted one of them. In the end, Roquette left on her own... The government recruited her again with a lucrative offer when the New Krypton situation exploded, and Lab 7 was vacant for almost half a year before Parker showed up.
As far as Sajani was concerned, he'd been nothing but trouble from the start.
It was maybe five minutes after the guy set foot in the building before Sajani's reverbium experiment -- her eight-month long endeavor to synthesize an artificial vibranium compound -- literally blew up in her face. Sajani knew she could have stabilized the material, given time, but Parker, the presumptuous fuckwit, somehow beat her to the control console and corrected her math, during his interview. Then, after he got the job, he ripped off her research for those stupid noise-reduction headphones of his. Sure, the work Parker had produced since then wasn't bad, like that impact resistant polymer he'd developed, but she figured he'd stolen all that from someone else, too. And it wasn't just that which stoked the burning fire of her Parker-hate. Oh, no.
He was flakey for one. Any time you set an appointment with him, if he didn't show up late, then he left in the middle with some lamoid excuse. And he'd have this weird, squinty look on his face as he ran off, like he had a migraine headache, acid reflux and acute constipation all at once. Sajani had seen that look so often by now she was convinced Parker might have some kind of brain tumor, but no. He was probably just being an asshole.
That would all be annoying enough on its own, but he was so goddamn self-righteous on top of all this. Two weeks after he started working, he went on this tirade in the Atrium just because everyone wasn't catatonic after Spider-Man failed to stop some nutcase from blowing up a bank. And then there was that ridiculous video-speech he'd posted on the Daily Bugle website after he got infected with spider-powers. There Parker was, perched on a streetlamp, begging everybody else with the spider-island bug to risk their lives fighting a riot in Bryant Park with the Avengers. Sajani could do whatever a spider could, too, but you didn't see her telling everybody how to live their lives.
Even worse than all the earnest moralizing was the fact that Parker was an idiot. Okay. He was a genius just like the rest of the Lucky Seven. He probably tested through the roof, but he was obviously an idiotic genius. Every time Sajani tired to engage him intellectually, he disappointed.
Take this shrinking debate they'd gotten into in the Atrium this morning... Parker had taken a look at her latest experiment because he was on "double check duty" -- this wholly unnecessary new policy of Max's in which he had the think tank members review each other's new projects as a safety review. Part of Sajani's invention involved condensing synthetically derived Kryptonian crystalline material to manipulate its atomic structure, and Parker thought her use of Pym Particles was a mistake for some reason.
"Parker, you're seriously trying to tell me that you prefer Ray Palmer's miniaturization methodology to Hank Pym's?" she asked, shaking her head in disbelief. "Pym's a better scientist than Palmer hands down. And you're telling me your B.F.F. Spider-Man would rather be hanging out with the Atom instead of Giant Man?"
"I never said that," Parker insisted, the waffling douche bag. "You're putting words in my mouth. All I said is that Palmer's method is the best way to accomplish what you're going for."
"Pym Particles are way better than that white dwarf crap!"
"Pym Particles are more versatile, sure," Parker admitted, "but that's the whole problem right there. They can make something smaller just the same as they can make something bigger."
"Which is awesome!"
"Unless all you want to do is make something smaller. If that's what your design requires, and you want to cut down on the extraneous variables of your project, Palmer's white dwarf lensing approach is the way to go. You don't have to waste your time trying to calibrate the charge of the power source or worry about inadvertent inversions dependent on the particle flow. Unless it's saturated with chronoton particles or adverse fourth dimensional radiation, white dwarf energy is always going to make something smaller or revert it to its regular size. And you can readily retain all of the mass and density if you're worried about structural integrity, while the fractal elasticity of Pym Particles will still allow for low level wave fluctuation from frequencies as low as insect brain activity."
"Well if you're worried you're too dumb to do things right, then sure..."
"K-I-S-S, Sajani," he said then. "Keep It Simple Stupid!"
"Are you calling me stupid, Parker?"
"Of course not," he sighed. "I'm just trying to live by the standards Kelly Johnson and every engineer worth their salt has ever lived by."
"No, you're being all smug about calling me stupid," she corrected.
Then Parker just gargled this sound that wasn't even a word. Something like "RARRGH!"
Sajani just smiled. She loved coaxing that frustrated grunt out of him. Getting a rise out of this dork was often the highlight of her day. It was almost becoming a sexual thrill.
No. It was just the joy of getting a man to admit he was wrong, is what it was...
So, yeah, Sajani sort of got off on busting his balls. It didn't really mean anything. No matter what her therapist said. It had been maybe her tenth session since she'd started telling Dr. Foster about the new jerk at work when her shrink first suggested that Sajani might be attracted to the guy, and it took another three sessions for her to admit to Claire that it might be true.
She might kind of loathe the schmuck, but that didn't mean Sajani Jaffrey wouldn't hate-fuck Peter Parker within an inch of his life under the right circumstances... That there weren't times at home alone with her Horizon Brand Massage-Wand Mk III that she imagined raking her finger-nails against those tight abs of his until they bled and she came screaming his name, riding that big dick of his into the ground...
But then Dr. Foster suggested the hostility Sajani routinely displayed toward Parker was a mask for actual feelings she was harboring for Peter, and that was insane. Just like Claire's assertion that her focus on extra-terrestrial biology and technology might be a manifestation of her own sense of alienation. Sajani knew exactly how she felt about him. She couldn't stand the guy. That didn't mean she didn't think he was good-looking in a hopeless, geek-slacker kind of way. Hell, handsome guys were almost always assholes, weren't they?
For all of his faults, she certainly couldn't say Parker wasn't in shape. She'd seen him half-naked around the building enough at this point to decide that. Like on his first actual day of work, when the Hobgoblin attacked Horizon to steal her unstable reverbium. Spider-Man came out of nowhere to try and stop him, and of course chaos ensued.
When nobody could find Parker after the web-head and that flying freakshow had fled the scene, Max had been worried enough to break protocol by opening Parker's private lab just to make sure that idiot was still alive. Sure enough, there he was, blasting Broadway showtunes in his boxer briefs while scribbling design notes on a whiteboard. Apparently, that was part of Parker's "process" and that's why everyone was sure to steer clear of Lab 7 afterwards unless it was absolutely necessary. Especially after a similar incident unfolded during that arachnid contagion crisis. This time they opened Lab 6 to find Parker stripped to his skivvies again, hanging out with Spider-Man by the vat of spider-antidote Morbius and Mr. Fantastic had developed with Anti-Venom's pseudo-symbiote. Granted, at the time, Sajani was still shaking off her own near transformation into one of those spider-monsters, but as she recalled, Parker and the wall-crawler both had essentially the same physique, and if the bulge in Parker's tighty-whiteys was any indication, he wasn't just a big brain.
Especially if he was a grower, not just a shower.
Obviously, something else was going on with Parker. Could it really just be as simple as the fact that he was supposed to be hooked up with Spider-Man? The rumor around the lab was that he was the guy who whipped up all of that web-spinning tech for the wall-crawler. When the web-head first arrived on the scene, she always thought the webs were one of his powers -- they were one of hers when she got the spider-flu -- but apparently the real guy used some kind of device to do all that, and Parker had created them. It was supposed to be a big secret or something, given the non-moonlighting clause in the standardized Horizon Lab contract, but once Parker told Grady Scraps from Lab 3, it was pretty much public knowledge. Grady was the worst gossip in the building. Sajani assumed the boss was letting Parker's violation slide because of Max's do-gooder streak. Whatever.
This was the guy safety-checking her research.
"Well, like I said, I think you'd be better off with a white dwarf lens than a Pym Particle emitter," Parker said suddenly, "but no matter how you go about it, I think you've got a game-changer, here, Sajani,"
She felt a bit of heat creeping up from her neck as she sipped her coffee, avoiding his gaze.
One thing Sajani hadn't admitted to anyone, not even her therapist, was that shortly after Parker had introduced his Cryo-Cube 3000 technology -- a portable means for safely flash-freezing organic material, which, despite its ridiculous name was incredibly effective -- Sajani, herself, had tried working semi-nude in the privacy of her lab to see if anything inspired her...
It didn't.
Mostly it just made her feel silly and self-conscious.
And maybe just the teensiest bit turned on.
That cop girlfriend of Peter's hadn't come around with any snickerdoodles for a while, now, so she had to figure that misguided relationship was over.
"Hey, Parker..." she started to say when he cut her off.
"Don't worry, Sajani, your math is sound no matter which way you go with," he murmured before getting up and walking away. "I gotta go, though. Lab stuff. You know how it is..."
"Yeah," she lied as he walked off. "I know how it is."
*
When Max Modell first started Horizon Labs, everyone told him he was just building another "soulless corporation" so it became his goal to create the world's first soulful conglomerate, a business concern whose primary agenda was to make the world a better place. Profits were good, of course; they kept the lights on, but Modell refused to let money become the driving force behind his life's ambition. Somehow, after so many years at this, Max still managed to stick to that value.
It hadn't been easy. It'd been a delicate dance. He'd had to be very careful who he'd gotten in bed with, of course. Despite all his caution, Modell had fallen in love with a lawyer anyway. Max was just lucky his partner, Hector Baez, was a good man. With Hector's legal counsel, Max was still doing that delicate dance, and he wasn't sure that making a deal with Wayne Enterprises wasn't a tango into moral ambiguity.
WayneTech had its fair share of military weapons contracts, after all. Not as many as Stark Industries had enjoyed before Tony Stark had recently seen the light, and certainly not as much as LuthorCorp had enthusiastically pursued since its inception, but Max was a big believer in the doctrine of unintended consequences. He didn't want Horizon involved with the arms trade, and he hated the thought of S.I.S.-adapted bat-tomatons clearing out major cities on a whim... Modell didn't know Bruce Wayne well enough to be sure that could never be the man's ultimate endgame...
Barbara Gordon was a different story.
Max remembered the day he met her, when the girl just wanted a killer new home system and had money to burn. When Miss Gordon expanded those skills of hers to develop Clocktower Systems, he'd hoped it could one day become a company that Horizon could acquire and nurture, only to find WayneTech perpetually hovering in the way. Max always assumed this was based more on Wayne's personal relationship with the Gordon family than any malicious corporate interest, but he felt weary of the playboy's intentions all the same.
Bruce Wayne had a certain reputation. Not as a ruthless businessman or a mad titan of industry. From everything Max had heard, the man's heart was in the right place, but he could be... careless.
When Lucius Fox called on WayneTech's behalf to tell Max that Gordon was now the head of Information Technology and Computer Sciences at the firm and insistent about loading the Big S.I.S. app into their ro-bat programming, Max couldn't help but worry that a phenomenal young talent had been scooped up by a man who just saw a pretty face from his youth instead of a true pioneer in her field.
It was Hector who convinced him to take the meeting, reminding him how much Max liked to consider himself a good judge of character. Modell knew Barbara. She was a believer. Maybe this deal could be a good thing. Of course, the decision wasn't ultimately up to just him.
Legally, everything the members of his think tank produced was work-for-hire and he owned whatever they did -- considering the significant financial backing and unconventional freedom he afforded his employees, Hector had insisted on that clause in their contracts -- but the standards Modell was determined to live by required him to grant them some substantial say in the manner in which their work might be utilized. That's why he insisted that Uatu Jackson, the resident creative engineer of Lab 5, be present at the meeting in which he discussed the license with Gordon.
Max's major concern was that WayneTech would abuse the technology. Like they'd start using it for corporate espionage or some nonsense like that, but Barbara's prospectus made it clear that they had no intention of taking advantage, impressing upon him just how many state and local law enforcement agencies they were currently working with globally that already had access to their software. What really allayed many of his greatest fears was WayneTech's concession to grant Horizon ample oversight over the use of the ro-bat network data stream.
Regretfully, Uatu seemed less than attentive during that part of her thorough presentation.
"So you're telling me the combat A.I. can immediately calibrate an optimal non-lethal offense based on the biometric analysis from our software?" Uatu beamed. "Are the attacks actually based on the real Batman's moves?"
"Mr. Jackson, I think you may be focusing on the wrong aspects of this proposal," Max sighed. Frankly, Horizon's youngest boy genius seemed a little too star struck. "There are some serious civil rights issues to consider..."
"Whatever, Max," Uatu shrugged. "If Batman wants my app, that's awesome! Dude took down the Hulk with his bare hands! If we can help him get the job done, I say let's do it!"
Max knew enough to give up. He loved that Jackson wasn't in this for the money, either. That childlike innocence was part of the reason he had hired the kid. The fact that he was one of the smartest members of the research team certainly didn't hurt. Of course, now that Modell knew that Uatu's main interest lie in building anti-monster defense strategies, he was a little leery. Jackson's vampire restraint equipment had been surprisingly useful in that unfortunate incident with Dr. Morbius, but Max wasn't sure he wanted to encourage the boy. Hopefully this monster-hunting fixation was just a phase Uatu would grow out of with puberty, but there really was no telling with these boy wonder types.
Lord knows Lex Luthor still had his idiosyncrasies. Max remembered when he and the rest of the scientific community considered Luthor a brilliant young crank with a weird thing for extra-terrestrial research. Now look at him.
Modell was determined not to let the same fate befall Uatu. He was just as determined to help the rest of his employees stay on the straight and narrow... even the former ones.
"Well, I'm glad Mr. Jackson's on board, but I was hoping we could discuss a possible quid pro quo in addition to Horizon's licensing fee, Miss Gordon," Max said.
"I'm not exactly sure what arrangements I'm authorized to make on behalf of the company," Barbara said uneasily, "but I can certainly try my best..."
"Doctor Kurt Langstrom," Modell said. "Rumor has it that he's had the misfortune to transform into a man-sized chiropteran on occasion..."
"If you're referring to the Man-Bat, then yes, I have it on good authority that those rumors are true."
"Is it also true that Batman has developed a serum to counteract the metamorphosis?"
"I'm not completely sure about that side of operations," Barbara said. "I'm just tech support, Max. But if he did, and Batman, Incorporated had ownership of such a thing, I think Mr. Wayne might be concerned about sharing that information for fear it could be used to reverse engineer the original formula. It's a dangerous mutagenic compound that's already made its way out into the open before..."
"I only want the antidote to help a friend," Modell assured her. "Michael Morbius."
"The living vampire?" Barbara gawped. "That's asking a lot, Max. We don't even know that it'd work against the specifics of Morbius' condition..."
"I think it's worth exploring at least," Max insisted. "I put Michael in Lab 6 not just because he'd been a friend. His research on artificial plasma could have changed everything we know about blood transfusions..."
"And I appreciate that, but Morbius is incarcerated right now because of the lengths he went to in pursuit of his research."
"What if I sweeten the deal?"
"How do you plan on doing that?"
"If Batman, Inc. wants specialized, non-lethal tech to deal with meta-powered criminal assailants, I have just the man to help you..."
*
It was a hard thing to realize that you'd been doing everything wrong for practically your whole life, but that's where Peter Parker found himself. For the last several months he'd been learning everyday in every way that he'd been screwing the pooch on this whole Spider-Man thing since the first time he'd slipped into those tights.
His first and greatest mistake was that he'd never gotten himself a proper secret lair.
There were a lot of valid, practical reasons for that. When he first started out, he was only fifteen, for one. Slipping out at night to fight the villain-of-the-week had been difficult enough with his poor, bereaved aunt puttering around the house, hovering over him. The chances of him setting up a fully tricked out crime-fighting workspace without her finding out was a dubious prospect at best -- even if he could have afforded one at the time.
In case you couldn't tell, Peter's poverty was another one of those valid, practical reasons he had gone without for so long.
Peter wanted to believe that he'd done an amazing job of making do with the limited resources at hand. There'd been no batcaves or fortresses of solitudes for the Spectacular Spider-Man. He'd been forced to hide all his gear in locked trunks and false-bottom drawers and a shoddily constructed fake closet compartment. And while he'd enjoyed the amenities of Avengers Tower for a brief while and was always welcome at the Baxter Building, he'd never appreciated just how nice it was to have a place all to himself until now.
To the rest of the staff at Horizon, it was just Lab 7, but to Peter Parker, it would always be his first decent spider-lair. A place he could stash his costumes and equipment and, more importantly, a work station where he could build better tech. This was where he'd put together his stealth suit and new spider-armor. Where he'd made color-blending spider-tracers with full audio capabilities. The place where he'd perfected voice-activated web-shooters with magnetic webbing.
This was the all-new, fully equipped nerve-center of Spider-Man's war on crime, and he was paid handsomely for his time there. It was, simply, Peter's dream come true.
Max Modell was the best boss he'd ever had. Of course, that wasn't much of a distinction. After all, Jolly J. Jonah Jameson had made repeated attempts to have Spidey arrested. Come to think of it, so had Tony Stark after Peter's brief consultancy at Stark Industries, during the Civil War...
Of course, this was selling Max short. Max Modell wasn't a great boss because he hadn't sent super-goons after Spider-Man... Max wasn't even a great boss because he'd set up a working environment that let Peter work at his own pace in his own time at his own hours... although that was pretty awesome, obviously. What made Modell his favorite employer of all time was the simple fact that Max got it: the joy of science for its own sake.
That's why, despite a late night with the Avengers dealing with the revenge of Brother VooDoo, Peter had been sure to make it into the lab bright and early. Max wanted everyone on-site for some kind of open house. Pete wasn't completely clear on the details... he'd been pretty busy lately, but if it was important to Max, he was going to keep the man happy. It was the same sense of loyalty he'd seen in all of the Lucky Seven... Even that pill, Sajani Jaffrey.
He figured that was why Grady Scraps was wandering around the building in a tweed jacket and bowtie today, but you never really knew with Grady. The way Bella Fishbach from Lab 4 described it, before Peter started, Grady insisted on pinstripes and plimsoles on these kinds of occasions. Scraps was a quirky guy to say the least.
When he met with the Lucky Seven about the open house, Max hadn't said anything about dressing up or anything, but he had suggested to Peter that he remained dressed for the day, which got a good laugh from the rest of the staff.
Sheesh. One goofy little white lie to cover for the fact that he was changing out of his Spidey suit, and Peter was never going to live it down. And yeah, there was that time he had to give Kaine his Spidey suit after their fight in Lab 6 during Spider-Island... The only good thing about that was Peter doubted anyone at Horizon suspected he might actually be the web-head based on that alone.
Anyway, with this open house mentality at work, there wasn't too much Spidey stuff lying around, not that Peter was in the habit of leaving his gear out.
When he started dating Carlie Cooper, C.S.I., it became imperative that he hide his various spider-stuff in his black box, the secured vault he had inside his lab, due to the ever-likely possibility that his super-sleuth girlfriend might drop by his apartment unannounced and notice a spider-tracer or web-fluid chemicals and figure out his dirty little secret. Not that his caution had helped in the long run. Carlie figured it out anyway and dumped him all the same. Another fun little consequence of that Spider-Island nightmare.
No. That had been his fault. He should have told her the truth. At first, he'd just wanted to be sure that Carlie liked him for him, not the web-slinging superhero, but they'd crossed that threshold. She had told Peter she loved him. Right in his new lair, in fact. On the very work station where he was sitting right now...
When the spider-epidemic broke out, Carlie, the first person whose infection Peter had been aware of, was also the first to figure out that a genetically-engineered super-virus based on the web-head's DNA was most likely the work of Miles Warren, the one-time Empire State University biology professor who'd become The Jackal.
Before she went to the higher-ups at the NYPD with her theory, Carlie and Peter had gone to one of Warren's old labs to look for clues. Peter thought Carlie was probably right, but figured they were about to wander into a long-abandoned and boring corner of his old alma mater. Instead, they ended up in a tussle with Chance, Scorcher, and White Rabbit -- three of Spidey's least favorite C-list villains. Things had gotten pretty hot and heavy, what since the Scorcher had spider-sense and all, but Peter and Carlie managed to take them down.
After dropping the bad guys off in the pokey, Carlie was all hot for Pete to contact Spider-Man, the world's finest Jackal-hunter, so he took her to his lab where he planned to pretend to do just that.
Lucky for him -- and not just in a secret identity sense -- they ended up tearing each other's clothes off as soon as Peter sealed the door.
"Oh shit, Pete," Carlie said, pulling down his pants after he tore her shirt open. "We could have died!"
Who was it who'd once extolled the virtues of Thank-God-We're-Alive sex? Oh, right. Johnny.
They'd had sex twice since she first got infected, but he had always ignored the fact that Carlie had powers now. After watching her take on White Rabbit, however, that was kind of difficult. Peter didn't want to say that a little girl-on-girl action had kind of done it for him, but that was only because he was really good at keeping his embarassing secrets...
Still, it was Carlie who'd suggested they take things to the next level.
"Not down here," she said, stepping out of her panties -- the last shred of clothing between them -- then glancing upward. "Let's do it up there."
Peter watched, slack-jawed, as she lept to the ceiling some twenty-five feet above, clinging there as she fashinoned herself a sex-sling.
He had never really considered the sex-play applications of his webbing, because it seemed like a terrible waste of pretty expensive chemicals, but after he jumped up to join his girlfriend with organic web-shooters and a wicked imaginination, his eyes had been opened... when she hadn't webbed them shut, at least.
Not everything about Spider-Island had been terrible.
Sex with Carlie had always been good -- better than good even... sensational at times -- but Peter always had to be careful, what with the proportionate strength of a spider and all, but that day in his lair, he hadn't had to fret over that since Carlie was just as strong. Of course, there was a reason he always had to be that little bit more careful with her than he'd ever had to be with anyone else...
They'd tried out a few things up on top of his lab before she first asked. They'd both taken turns on the sex-swing, although only Carlie had climaxed so far. Then she plopped onto the sling on her back, her ass swaying before him, upside down on the ceiling.
"Oooooh, you know what I want now, Peter," she whined as he pushed his dick into her from behind. "Give it to me!"
And he did. He knew exactly what she wanted because it was what she always wanted and it was the very thing that worried him about sex with Carlie. She always wanted him to spank her. Peter was always ready and willing to do just that, but it wasn't really his thing. That was more like Harry or something. Peter usually managed to get into it, but he was concerned that he was going to hurt her eventually.
In the time since they'd first gotten intimate, everytime he saw Carlie's ass, it had this red shine to it. He couldn't imagine she was ever too comfortable sitting down. Was that why she was always standing when he'd visit her at the crime lab? Why she always curled up like a cat on his lap on the couch whenever they were at his place watching MythBusters?
Bearing that in mind, he gave her the kind of firm but playful love tap he'd grown comfortable with while they made love.
"Really spank me, daddy," she said in a baby voice. "I've been such a bad girl."
He did it again not that much more hard, but Carlie was having none of that.
"Harder, Peter!" she pleaded. "Don't be a pussy!"
That set him off. His meager paddling before had only confirmed that the tensile strength of her muscles had been increased by the virus, so Peter slapped her ass with the kind of force that would have sent some street punk sprawling across the room. Carlie squealed in delight, her back arching as she shivered.
"Ooh, yeah, daddy," she groaned. "Spank your little spider-slut!"
He still hadn't quite gotten used to Carlie's unique brand of dirty talk. He'd certainly heard filthier things in the heat of passion, but that was from a girl who prowled around in skin tight black leather. When he first met Carlie she had always seemed like such a sweet girl...
"Ah! NO!" Carlie screamed as he spanked her again. "You're not a pussy, Peter..."
Then again, there was that side to her he hadn't seen until they started dating the night of Harry's going away party. It'd been this whole costume affair, and as Peter recalled, Carlie had shown up in a leather catsuit of her own as the Black Cat at the last minute. Where in her closet had she been hiding that all this time?
"Tuh-take my pussy," she moaned as he slowed his thrusts for a bit, just enough to lull her into a false sense of bored security...
He slapped her twice -- once on the right cheek with an open palm and immediately again with a backhand to the left. The way she cried out, her cunt rippling around his hardness as she pushed back into him, Carlie didn't have to tell him to do it again.
He was always reluctant at first, but it just turned her on so much, which made her very generous afterwards...
"Ah ah ah!" she whimpered as he pumped her pussy with the kind of long, lazy strokes that drove Carlie wild in time. "My... my head..." she blubbered... "It's... it's tingling...."
"Me, too, baby," Peter groaned. He didn't atually know what she was talking about, but this was the kind of lie you told someone in the middle of fucking them...
Then the web-swing snapped, and she slipped free from his dick, tumbling toward the floor. Peter launched himself after her, realizing he was an idiot. Of course that'd been Carlie's spider-sense. Had they really been up there for an hour?
In a matter of micro-seconds, they were intwined, one of Peter's arms wrapping around her hips as he twisted his other toward the ceiling. To his credit, Peter realized he wasn't actually wearing his web-shooters before he tried tapping his palm...
From this height, the fall couldn't really hurt either of them, he figured. Unless Carlie, in her inexperience, landed on her head or neck...
Thwip! Thwap!
Suddenly, Carlie's legs were around him and the two lovers were no longer falling so much as swinging wide over his lab. A tangled, naked mess of sweaty limbs slammed against a far wall.
Now, this was usually when, in Peter's experience, he tended to flop down onto his ass, but instead he found himself suspended above the floor, Carlie's legs still ensnaring his torso as she clung to the wall.
"Oh no," she practically growled as he squirmed to get free. "You're not going anywhere, Peter Parker. I need some serious deep dicking."
She effortlessly reached down between them, supporting both their weight with one hand as she seized his cock and rubbed the tip on the wet folds of her cunt. Peter wasn't sure he could have pulled that off, and for the first time he started to wonder if Carlie's proportionate strength might be greater than his...
The way she was gripping his dick like a vice in her fist had him real worried, in fact...
"Now I want it rough," Carlie told him, squeezing just hard enough to elicit a wince. "I'm not some paper doll, Peter. I'm not going to break, so no holding back..."
"No holding back?" He looked at her then, still a little uncertain.
"No limits," she intoned, unhanding his cock but glaring back at him with this steely resolve smoldering in her big brown eyes that seared any of his doubts away.
"Okay, 'spider-slut,'" he grunted as he torqued into her. Carlie just grinned and kissed him as he thrust hard and fast. It wasn't just a hungry kiss. It was more like a devouring. She only paused once so she nip his bottom lip, actually breaking the delicate skin, then she was all over his blood-tainted mouth again, like she wanted to taste it.
Fuck! What had he gotten himself into?
Peter seized one of her nippes and pinched. He felt her kind of giggle into his mouth. Then he twisted it, hard, and she broke the lip-lock, shouting, "That's it, hurt me!" He grasped both of her breasts and used his powers to grip them as he leaned back.
"Oh fuck, daddy, yeah!" she screamed. "Pull my tiny titties out to double D's!"
For fucksake, Carlie, Peter thought. Sure, the lab's soundproof, but still...
Apparently, the novelty of perpendicular missionary position had worn off, so Carlie disentangled her legs from his waist and put her ankles up on Peter's shoulders, pushing him into a semi-kneeling position on the wall. Pete was familiar with the move, but it'd been sometime since he'd done it quite like this... and only once with a woman who could brace herself with her own spider-powers. The obvious advantage was gravity giving you a little hand to get that bit deeper as you plunged cunt depths you'd never felt before.
The way her breath caught as she let herself fall onto his cock, it seemed like Carlie agreed.
"Oh shit, you're soooo deeeeep, Captain," she groaned. "Tuh-take it to launch depth."
Peter was still guarding his strength as he thrust into her, just a bit, but she didn't seem to notice.
"Oh, oh yes fuh-fuck me, you wuss" she groaned. "I'm close... so close..."
Then she lost her grip, dropping them both to the floor.
They landed with dual wet smacks on their backs, next to each other, winded yet laughing. Peter looked over at Carlie, who, grinning, punched him across the jaw before rolling on top of him pinning him down across his chest with one arm while her other hand snaked down his side.
"I said no limits," she smiled, sliding her pussy onto his prick.. "One of us is going to be the other's bitch, Pete," Carlie informed him, still pressed up against his chest as she slowly started to hump him. "You decide who..." she moaned, really riding him now. "If you can."
He would have been freaked and pissed if he wasn't so unbelievably thrilled by her right then. Sure, he made the effort, but as far as he was concerned, this was all for her. If she wanted to dominate, that was fine. Peter was content to just go for the ride for a while.
He felt her free hand gripping his ass, but was too intrigued by the exquisite bliss of her cunt working his manhood to wonder what she was up to until he felt her finger inching toward his anus.
Oh, hell no! he thought.
Maybe, just maybe, Carlie was stronger than him right now, but he'd faced stronger foes in his day, and he was still standing... because he knew what it took to win. And the stakes back then didn't seem nearly so dire right now.
He might have cheated a little, using Weaver's Moment of Peace to kick her up off of him and into his arms as he scrambled to his feet, but everything else was pure instinct. He spun her around, shoving her toward one of the work tables they'd been trying to avoid with enough force that Carlie tripped and her top half fell onto it, scattering beakers and spilling fluids.
"No!" Carlie yipped, her breasts mushed onto the cold, wet metal surface.
Before she could turn, Peter was behind her, holding her down. Then he was inside her again. He watched as her arms slashed against the soaked surface. By themselves, the chemicals he used for his web fluid were harmless and slick. Even sloshed together, the components didn't become viscous until properly heated.
"Oh fuck! Raaaavage me, daddy!" Carlie wailed as he fucked her, loving every bit of it. "I'm your bitch..."
Peter was pretty sure she'd just let him win at this point... that she had just been trying to push the right buttons to force him into giving her the raw, rough and tumble fuck she'd been craving for years. She had played him. Well, if that was what she really wanted...
He pulled out. She was just looking up over her shoulder in surprise when he lifted her up and slammed her onto the table on her back,climbing on top of her. Carlie feigned protest as he mounted her, but it didn't seem too difficult to pin her. One hand kept her arms up over her head while the other found its way to her throat... Just for leverage as he pushed in... Just to keep her down as he reeled back... But her eyes lit up as his fingers closed around her neck, silently begging Do it! Do it now! Peter squeezed ever so slightly... Not even choking her really, but those same eyes suddenly rolled into the back of her head.
"Oh fuuuuck!" Carlie shrieked. "You unbelievable bastard!" Her nails scraped his shoulders and arms as she bucked under him. "I... I'm cumming, you shit!!!"
Peter quickly released her because that was when he knew he was about to lose control and he might accidentally kill her as he started to fuck her relentlessly. Carlie was still shouting obscenities beneath him, but it didn't really matter. He could barely hear her anymore. He didn't stop hammering her until he was done. He was vaguely aware that she might have had a few more orgasms before he finally came, but it wasn't until he'd emptied himself inside her that he felt her soft lips kissing his ear, whimpering "thank you" over and over in short, hoarse gasps.
Thorougly exhausted, Peter kissed her neck soothingly as he crumpled atop her, caressing her face as they both turned to look at each other.
That was a new one, he thought.
He felt like he'd just gone a round with Solomon Grundy, but as Carlie nuzzled against him, stroking the back of his head his her soft fingers, it occurred to him that while he was sure to be just as sore in the morning, the aftermath of his one fight with Grundy hadn't quite felt like this. "So," Peter started to say, "about that Black Cat costume of yours..."
"I love you," Carlie whispered to him then.
She had said a lot of crazy things to him in the last couple of hours. Things that, honestly, Peter couldn't imagine any actual person saying, and he just... really liked that about her. She was off-the-wall and surprising. Right then and there, though, after everything they had just done, this was the last thing he'd expected to hear from her, which was crazy and off-the-wall on his part.
They were definitely at that stage in their relationship, but he... he just couldn't say it back to her. Partly because she'd webbed his mouth shut the second she said those three little words.
"You don't have to say anything," she explained. "Not because of what I just told you. I... I just needed to say it. So that you know that I trust you and hopefully, you can trust me."
Peter eventually realized this had been a test. Not the sex part -- well, maybe... If he'd just torn off his web-gag and told her everything right then and there, they'd probably still be together and that wouldn't have been the last time he'd had sex...
In the brief pause while his mind reeled, Carlie got a call from the station. Peter slowly peeled off his gag as they both dressed.
"It's okay, Peter," she said. "Let's just meet up later. You and me... and Spider-Man."
The next day, he tried to set up the most boring threesome of his life. Him, Carlie, and the web-swinger, sending word through her precinct that Spidey and Peter Parker were waiting for her on the roof. When Carlie climbed up to only find the web-head with the remnants of a reuben while he munched on a pretty excellent cubano, he actually thought he could convince her that "Peter" had been there.
She didn't really seem to buy it, but before she could push the issue, there was a call from dispatch about the Shocker robbing a bank, and after they both swung over to handle it, Carlie Cooper morphed into a giant spider.
The next time he saw her, after he'd cured everybody, she had already packed up the drawer he'd given her in his apartment, forced him to admit the truth, and broke up with him
Okay. Spider-Island had been thoroughly terrible. But the sex! The sex...
The Human Torch had suggested to him during their last movie night -- Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Johnny's choice, of course -- that Peter had been spending so much time at work recently out of a misguided attempt to sublimate his most basic, primal urges, and that unless he found a proper outlet for his sex drive, he was going to act out in some outrageous manner, but Pete took that advise with a bigger grain of salt than it deserved. Honestly, Johnny had taken this whole Cosmic Kinsey thing way more seriously than the web-head had ever expected, but the guy didn't have anything but a few honorary degrees from a some well-known party schools.
Peter tried not to think about all that as he tinkered with this new toy he'd been working on. He'd had a lot of time to think about those various corps out in the galaxy, mucking about with rings powered by the emotional spectrum. Will, rage, fear and compassion... He'd learned several months back that those feelings could be manipulated on a molecular level with the right vibrational frequencies. If Peter could generate the correct tone, the next Red Lantern attack might not sweep up Wolverine again...
He was still testing the device's housing when he heard the news report. "Traffic has been suspended on the Brooklyn Bridge as the Hobgoblin and various ninja assassins have assaulted a bar near the East River..."
Peter usually listened to the radio while he worked these days. Horizon was different than when he worked at the Bugle. Back then, he knew what was going on. Now he had the kind of dream job where he could spend two weeks working on a mild radioactive tracer dust so he could track the Sandman's consciousness without poking his head out of the lab.
Sure, Peter could have just gone with a police scanner, but despite all assumptions to the contrary, hi's experience with those things had been disastrous. Sure, you had an up-to-the-minute account of every crime going on in the immediate vicinity, so a right-minded superhero could do everything possible to help out... But in Spidey's case, by the time he suited up and made it to, say, a bodega robbery, New York's Finest had already handled it.
This was why those guys were the real heroes. They didn't need him for the day-to-day stuff as much as he liked to think when he was younger. It was the supervillain incidents they might need a hand with, and those always got mentioned on newsradio.
Peter had given up on WNYX after the management changes. WFSK used to have this great late night show he'd listen to during his midnight patrols. What the hell ever happened to Paige Angel? he wondered for the umpteenth time.
He knew he shouldn't go. Max wanted him in the lab right now. And there were so many other people out there who could deal with this. Both Hercules and Spider-Girl had tussled with this new Hobgoblin that had popped up this fall. Surely, one of them would show up...
But what if they didn't?
*
Barbara thought she'd done an excellent job with her presentation. Modell had seemed primed to sign the deal until he'd made this request for the Man-Bat antidote. She hadn't expected that. But she should have, right? One of the mayor's biggest complaints about the lab was that they'd employed Morbius... Max clearly cared about the guy. Why wouldn't he want to try to cure him?
Was Babs losing her edge?
What else won't I see coming? she asked herself as Modell led her into Horizon's seventh lab.
"Miss Gordon, I'd like you to meet the newest addition to our little family..." Max announced as the door opened. Barbara peered in as she entered. While Lab 6 had been clean and completely in order -- probably because it was empty. Lab 5 had been a bit of a mess. Almost like a thirteen-year-old kid was working there or something. Lab 7 wasn't much better. There was enough clutter to make it obvious someone had been at work, and working hard, but Barbara had some sense that it was a controlled kind of chaos. Like the guy who'd left all of these scattered transistors and circuits knew exactly where everything was when he needed it... Whoever this tech-guru was. Other than the untidy debris, she saw no sign of the man himself.
There was nobody inside.
"I guess Mr. Parker isn't in today," Max sighed. "Despite my emphatic instructions."
"Parker?" Barbara repeated.
"Our most recent member of the Lucky Seven has a real knack for jerry-rigging quick and dirty tech to meet spontaneous circumstances," Max explained. "Now, he's asked me not to go into the specifics of some of the work he's done that makes him uniquely qualified... and I would never dare let him out of his contract at Horizon to work for Dark Knight Enterprises or whatever the devil you're calling it, but I think Peter could be a real resource to your organization that we could lend out to you in a pinch..."
"Peter Parker?" she blanched, incredulous. "Peter Parker works here now?"
"I'm surprised you've heard of him," Max admitted. "Guess your research on my little lab here was a little more extensive than I expected... Despite his intellectual acumen and natural ability, I'm afraid Mr. Parker's only beginning to make a name for himself in this field. I understand he spent the last several years as a crime photographer, if you can believe it..."
"Oh god, no."
"I know how it sounds, but I assure you, he's thoroughly capable," Modell was telling her in overly soothing tones. God, she must have been having a visible freak out.
Why wouldn't she be? It had all just clicked. Barbara, of all people, should have known. Why hadn't she checked the lab's current employment roster? Especially when, all of a sudden, Horizon had long-standing Spider-Man villains crawling out of the high-tech woodworks? She'd thought it was all about the connections to Jameson and Morbius, but that was stupid... Of course he was working here...
Pull it together, Gordon, she told herself before facing Max. "I'm sure your guy's just as good as you say, Mr. Modell," she said, "but Mr. Wayne likes to thoroughly vet any and all employees on this project."
"And I'm sure he'll pass muster," Max said then. "Trust me. Peter Parker is the guy you want..."
"No, he isn't." Barbara insisted. "He isn't." She was doing it again. Freaking out. "I... I need to go, Max."
"Miss Gordon?" Max was understandably confused by her outburst, but she'd make it up to him.
"I will get you that Man-Bat antidote," Barbara promised as she wheeled her way out of the lab. "For the terms we agreed on... as long as I can leave right now."
"Uh... okay...?"
She'd actually made her way back to the Atrium before Max caught up with her. The once buzzing nest of intellectual activity was now silently entranced by a single high def display of a local media outlet's account of a supervillain incident in Midtown.
"The Hobgoblin has launched an assault in Brooklyn's Rock Bottom Bar," Indira Daimonji announced on New York's premiere news station.
Of course, Barbara thought. Another one of his...
But with any luck, Spider-Man was swinging his way there right now and she'd make it out of here before he got back. Barbara turned to resume her mad dash out of the building only to find Peter Parker himself standing between her and the exit.
Maybe he won't recognize me, she hoped briefly. After all, she was older now and she'd let her hair grow out longer than ever in the last few months...
"Barbara?!" he blurted.
She didn't understand why she thought for one second that might work. Like a pair of glasses and a smart business outfit was actually going to fool anybody, even with her other accessory. This damn wheelchair of hers wasn't always the distraction she wanted it to be.
When she first heard his name, she'd cursed herself for not anticipating this ahead of time, but actually seeing him now she couldn't help but wonder, what were the odds?
Barbara had been to New York a number of times since that first encounter with Spider-Man in Gotham all those years ago. Her first trip to the Big Apple as Batgirl, when she ended up helping the Defenders when the demon Dormammu possessed the Multi-Man, she'd worried the whole time she was going to run into her wall-crawling one night stand. It took three more Big Apple trips over as many years before she realized that New York was a pretty big city. By the time she was Oracle, though, she was completely capable of knowing where Parker was at all times while she was there, like when the Joker threatened to level Manhattan with a neutron bomb and Oracle had interrogated him while he was trapped in a cargo container in Brooklyn.
But now that she actually found herself face-to-face with Peter Parker once more, it was just as terrible as Barbara Gordon always feared. She could see it all over his face... It would have been a total cliché to say that Parker looked like he'd seen a ghost, but he was definitely stricken.
Hell, so was she.
"I had heard that you..." he started to say before noting the chair. "I didn't know."
"It's been a very long time," she replied, looking away.
Barbara still couldn't believe it. He worked here now? Granted, she hadn't been keeping tabs on Spider-Man the same way she used to -- a deliberate decision after what happened. Oracle understood the importance of maintaining an up-to-date account of meta-human activity, but she'd just wanted one week without having to think about him and everything that had happened in her head during that bad Black Cat op. Of course, with her new job at WayneTech and all it entailed, she'd never gotten back into the web-swing of things. Seriously, though, how the hell had Peter Parker gone from abject unemployment to working for one of the top think tanks on the planet? Even if she had looked into things like she should have -- and she planned to do just that once she was out of the building -- Barbara wasn't sure she would have believed it.
The goddamn Parker luck, she thought to herself.
"Pete, I didn't know you knew Miss Gordon," Max said, breaking into Barbara and Pete's intense, impromptu staring contest. "She's been one of our preferred customers for a few years now..."
"Ms. Gordon, huh?" Peter mulled, rolling the sound of her last name around on his tongue. His initial shock had clearly worn off as Parker's cadence was now positively puckish with mischief. "Well, Mr. Modell, me and Barbara Gordon here met years and years ago, back when I did a campus tour at Gotham University..."
"Peter spent a rather dull night at my house," Barbara interrupted, picking up where he trailed off.
"Dull?" Parker's eyes quirked upward. Barbara ignored him.
"Gotham University Alumni are sometimes asked to host perspective students if there's a housing crunch," she explained further. "Especially us former scholarship students."
"Missed out on a preview of the madcap fun of dorm life, Peter?" Max asked with a chuckle.
"It wasn't that bad," Peter smiled. "Ms. Gordon managed to keep me pretty entertained."
Barbara didn't say anything to that. She was too busy trying not to blush.
"Funny, Babs," Parker said then, "but I thought I ran across you, um... your online profile a couple months back, but you never got back to me..."
"I'm sorry," she hissed softly, fighting to compose herself. "I've been a little too busy for social networking, Peter."
"Well, Barbara's our visiting rep from WayneTech," Max broke in. "They've taken an interest in Uatu's Big S.I.S. program, so I thought they might take a shine to some of the tech you've whipped up for... our mutual friend."
"And I'd love to show her some of that, sir," Peter swore. "Sincerely and truly, but something's come up..."
"Seriously, Mr. Parker?" Max sighed. "I thought I'd properly expressed how much I wanted my top tier R & D staff available today..."
"You did, sir. It's just that our, uh, mutual friend's got an errand to run and would appreciate some tech support," Peter said, looking past Max, distracted. Barbara followed his gaze to the big screen mounted in the lounge where Daimonji had been replaced with live footage of the super-powered fight.
"Shouldn't take more than an hour," Parker murmured as they both watched the Hobgoblin slice a police cruiser in twain with some kind of plasma sword. "Maybe two."
"Well, given the circumstances -- which actually brilliantly illustrates my argument in your favor -- I suppose I don't actually need you here to showcase your talent," Max acknowledged. "I'd appreciate it if I could show Miss Gordon some of your less-than public work, though. Nothing inside your black box or any of the gear you've whipped up for our friend, of course... Perhaps the adaptive countermeasures you developed for the mayor's Anti-Spider Squad using the contents of the NYPD's supervillain evidence locker."
"Absolutely," Parker nodded, stealing less-than-sly glances at her.
Max must have found it odd. Barbara had no idea how close he and Peter were. Hell, it was entirely possible that Modell knew everything about his employee's web-spinning activities, but considering the steps Parker had once taken to somehow remove that knowledge from the world at large, she doubted it. And Peter suddenly seemed reluctant to leave now. He'd been in such a hurry a moment ago... Barbara suspected she understood his sudden reluctance to head off -- he'd just see a woman he thought was dead, after all -- but the real work still needed doing.
"Don't let us keep you, Peter," she told him then. "I'm sure whatever you need to do is much more urgent than showing me your new toys. That's hardly a matter of life and death."
"Right..."
And just like that, he was rushing out the door. Barbara knew she should have been relieved, but that wasn't what she was feeling.
"I like to tease young Parker about his irregular hours," Max confided to Barbara, "but he always gets the job done."
"I bet he does," she murmured.
Barbara decided it was time to get her job done, so she followed Max back to Lab 7 where Peter Parker had been working apparently since she'd tried to drop him out of her life completely. She looked over everything he'd created and she demonstrated how impressed she was with his myriad accomplishments, but the whole time, she was worried he'd come back.
It was only after she'd mentally calculated how long it would realistically take him to get to Brooklyn and back before she finally let herself really see what Modell was showing her.
Barbara had used the crème de la crème of crime-fighting tech in her day. Bruce Wayne had practically invented the art, after all, but this was impressive by even those standards. And the consumer products Peter had come up with based on all this... She suddenly understood why Max didn't want Wayne Enterprises stealing him away.
Of course Parker was working here. This was where he belonged, wasn't it? She'd actually told him he was good enough for all this, hadn't she? Was all this because he'd actually listened?
Eventually, after she made the rounds with the rest of Max's team, Barbara managed to leave without making a scene and meet her driver.
"Where to, skipper?" Zinda asked after Barbara transferred herself into the town car.
"I'm not sure," Barbara confessed. "Give me a moment."
*
It probably went without saying, but Spider-Man was really starting to hate this new Hobgoblin since he first popped up last fall. And, no, it wasn't just that the jerk kept getting away.
First of all, what were with all the jokes? This new guy made these terrible, corny one-liners while they fought. That was Spidey's thing! No real goblin bantered like that. Not anymore. Sure, Norman used to peel off the occasional atrocious pun -- especially in the beginning -- but after the old bastard went totally homicidal, Osborn's sense of humor had devolved to the decidedly dark. Even his pithy asides fairly dripped with malice before he slipped into that coma. The new Hobby, by contrast, was more-or-less a prop comic supervillain -- Carrot Top hopped up on goblin serum and Ritalin.
And even worse, the ass-hat laughed at his own jokes.
That'd be annoying enough if his self-amused chuckling didn't resonate at a brain-scrambling hyper-sonic frequency. This wouldn't have bothered Spider-Man so much if his clone, Kaine, hadn't run off with the soundproof stealth suit Peter developed for these very occasions, but there you had it. What was done was done. Spider-Island had been a mess and things slipped through the cracks.
The web-head didn't even want to get started about that freaking plasma sword. And those wings! The goddamn bat-wings on the Hobgoblin's back! Goblins didn't use wings to fly! They used gliders, damn it! Peter might not have a lot of respect for Norman Osborn as a scientist or an engineer, but even he had to admit that those gliders were iconic! Even Menace had gotten the glider part right!
Hell, Peter had actually built one himself recently. A spider-glider, if you would. That was cool, right? Maybe he should have brought it with him today to deal with Hobby... Maybe then it wouldn't have been such a disaster.
Suffice it to say, the fight hadn't gone well. Spider-Man knew he'd saved lives, and hopefully he'd tossed a wrench in whatever Hobby was up to for the Kingpin, but most of that had come down to luck. He'd taken a few swipes from the goblin's flaming sword -- nothing too deep or searing, but he'd always managed to dodge that before -- and some shrapnel from a pumpkin bomb had nearly unmanned him...
He'd been distracted. How could he not be?
Seeing Barbara again had been an incredible shock. As he swung his way back to the lab after Hobby had flapped his way off, somewhere in the back of his head he knew that shock should have been "spectacular" or "sensational" or maybe even "amazing," but "incredible" really covered it.
He guessed he really shouldn't have been all that surprised Oracle was still alive. It was this terrible cliché in the capes and tights community that only the bad guys came back from the dead, but that wasn't really true, was it? The Human Torch was alive, right? Aunt May had even accomplished a return from the beyond or two in her day.
It didn't help that Barbara had shown up at Horizon of all places. Despite all appearances, Peter thought he'd set up a decent enough distance between his Spidey life and his workplace. Sure, he'd had a few fights in the hallways, but it's not like he was bursting out of broom closets to do that like in his naïve Daily Bugle days. He usually found a way to come into the building in costume when that kind of thing went down. The place was packed to the gills with geniuses. He tried not to push it.
Besides, when an old ally like Batgirl or Oracle or whoever she was came back from the dead, there was supposed to be all this crazy build up to it. Mysterious encounters with shadowy figures or something. Or they at least showed up in some really dramatic way. Like you're about to be killed by your greatest enemy and at the last minute, the original Blue Beetle swoops down and saves your ass.
They didn't just pop by your office on a fairly standard day to sheepishly say hi then send you on your way.
What had happened to Barbara? Why was she in that wheelchair now? Was it tied into Oracle's supposed death or was it the reason she hadn't been Batgirl for all this time? She'd said that wearing the costume stopped being an option when they last spoke, hadn't she?
That wasn't what really had his head reeling, though. What he really couldn't figure out was whether or not she'd come to Horizon looking for him or not. She said she hadn't known he worked there, but that could have just been for cover with Max, right? Peter's job wasn't exactly a secret or anything, and this was a woman who'd prided herself about knowing everything about him the last time they met...
But at the same time, it's not like he'd ever really expected to see Barbara again, even before he'd heard the greatly exaggerated rumors of Oracle's death... She'd made that perfectly clear when she'd dropped him off at the train station all those years ago and again when she broke contact during that nonsense with Norman Os-bot... Twice. She had a deep-seeded need to give him the brush off, which is why when he called to check in with Horizon after his little lunch date with Hobgoblin, Peter wasn't too surprised to discover that she had left shortly after he had.
"I saw on the news that Spider-Man managed to run-off the Hobgoblin," Max said over the phone. "Such a pity that he's failed to apprehend that madman so far..."
"He's not too jazzed about that either, sir," Peter said under his mask. "So, since I'm guessing the open house is over..."
"Feel free to head home if you want, Mr. Parker." Max chuckled. "Miss Gordon seemed rather impressed with the countermeasures you came up with for the Sinister Six," Max informed him.
Peter was always happy to hear Mr. Modell happy. Especially since he was still waiting for that other shoe to drop and for Max to kick him out.
The Parker luck was always out there... Waiting to strike.
"Good work, as ever, Mr. Parker," he said. "I'm sure Miss Gordon would have liked to say so herself, but she had a flight back to Gotham."
Peter kind of doubted that. If Barbara had come to Horizon to see him, then she could have and with a pretty solid cover story in place. Had this really just been some random bump-in?
He briefly thought about trying to find her at the airport, but between JFK, Laguardia, and Newark, he had too many to choose from. And despite the preponderance of spandex-clad crazies mad science experiments, and long thought dead friends and enemies who kept coming back, Peter Parker lived in the real world. This wasn't the third act of a bad romantic comedy.
Barbara was gone, just like she always wanted.
What could he do? Swing around Gotham City screaming out "Barbara Gordon!" at the top of his lungs?
Then again, Peter had more viable options now. It wouldn't be that hard to turn up at Wayne Enterprises. Hell, if he ever finally got his flight training, he could maybe even borrow the Fantasticar or a Quinjet from the Avengers. But what would he even say to her then? What did he even want from this poor woman?
He was still mulling it over as he swung his way home.
Peter would have much rather gone back to Horizon. Hell, he'd probably'd end up going back before the night was over, but he's taken a bit of a beating and he neeeded to clean himself up and slap on a bandage or two first.
It was still weird to web his way toward his new place in Tribeca. When he first moved in, Spidey was always sure to take the long way home on foot since he didn't want to risk climbing in through the window on the off-chance that Carlie had let herself in with her key, but now that they were no longer together, there wasn't much point in worrying about it. Especially not tonight, as the lovely Officer Cooper was currently a thousand miles away at a crime scene investigation convention in Central City.
Peter was supposed to be there with her, but, well, that wasn't really appropriate anymore, was it? Back when she first mentioned it months ago, he hadn't been sure they were ready to go away together, but he had to admit he'd been excited. Despite all these years, he still remembered how none of the girls at Midtown High had been interested in the least with joining him for a certain life-changing science exhibition on controlled radioactivity, but a decade later, there he'd been with a woman who couldn't wait to attend seminars on measurement uncertainty in forensic toxicology and chemistry. He remembered that Carlie had been really jazzed about Barry Allen's keynote speech. Whoever the hell that was.
Peter couldn't help but wonder if she ended up taking somebody else with her. He'd heard from Mary Jane that Carlie was "maybe sort of seeing" some hunky cop these days -- Spidey's exes were friends now, which was so much fun for him... really -- so maybe this new guy was in Central City with her right now. Maybe she was meeting someone else entirely...
Peter was almost able to pretend to be happy about those prospects. He knew he'd really hurt her. That was the last thing he had wanted.
The more he thought about it over the months -- and he thought about it a lot -- the more he started to suspect that the problem with Carlie might have been that she was a little too much like him. She was fun and smart and just as geeky as he was. That kind of thing sounded wonderful on paper, but at the end of the day, Peter kind of hated himself because he knew he wasn't always there for the people who loved him, so there were times he wondered if spending time with someone exactly like him was all that healthy. For either of them.
Had that been the real problem... the thing that had kept him from telling her the whole truth? Because Peter had eventually figured out how Carlie would have reacted to him being Spider-Man if he'd just told her like he should have. He'd learned by then that she could and would keep his secret, and then she'd do everything she could on the force to help him do just that. Carlie would have embraced the crime-fighting side of his double life in a way Mary Jane Watson never could.
And they both probably would have lost themselves and each other in Spider-Man's world because of it...
Was that why Peter found himself spending more and more time with MJ since his break-up with Carlie? Because Mary Jane would never let him disappear into the web-slinging the way Carlie would? Because, deep down, he needed someone to balance himself out?
Pete and MJ had always been friends, but they'd never really been alike. She was always there to tell him when he was screwing things up with his friends and family. Mary Jane understood the parts of life he never would. That's why he still needed her. Even if it was as a friend. Peter struggled to think of anybody who knew him as well as she did... Anyone who ever could. Maybe that was the reason it'd been so hard to move on when she left.
Because even now, the more time he spent with her -- whether it was a late night bite to eat or an afternoon helping Aunt May pack up his childhood home for her big move to Boston with Jay -- he had this sense of the planets realigning. Like the universe was trying to bring them back together.
Maybe that was what true love is. Just making the same mistake with the same person over and over again until the stars turned cold.
Probably not, thought. Peter knew wishful thinking when he thought it.
When Doctor Strange had fixed the mess Spider-Man had made of his life with Mary Jane, she had made a decision. She'd walked away from all the insanity that life entailed and he'd never blamed her for that. Deep down, he liked to think that she was safe now because of it and that now she could have the kind of life she deserved.
For years, Peter had been convinced that MJ was the only woman who could ever love him. He never thought for one second, however, that he was the only man who could love her. Come on. She was Mary Jane Watson. It'd be harder to find a man who'd met her who hadn't fallen head over heels, which meant there was probably someone out there besides him that she could love back... Someone who could make her happy without her having to worry he wasn't going to come home some night because the Shocker or Electro got a good shot in. Mary Jane deserved her chance at finding that stupid schmuck out there who had no idea how lucky he was yet, and whatever nigh-gravitational forces that he imagined might be drawing them toward each other, Peter was determined to let her live the life she truly deserved.
He had made her that promise, whether she knew it or not, and Peter Parker was so goddamn tired of breaking his promises. He knew that it usually happened because he kept making vows that he couldn't keep because they were impossible. Like he could actually make it so no one died ever. But this thing with MJ wasn't actually impossible. This was just hard. But Peter would live by it because she was his best friend...
That didn't mean he didn't get lonely.
Was it possible that Johnny had been more right than wrong when he'd recently suggested that Peter might be a little... frustrated these days? Was that why he was all worked up about this possibly-on-purpose-but-probably-not run-in Barbara Gordon? Was he just hoping to get laid?
No. Peter knew what happened when he went looking for superfriends with benefits.
The last time Spidey had seen Felicia Hardy, she was hooking up with Matt Murdock. Like that was going to end well for either of them. Black Cat, the girl with bad luck powers, and Daredevil, a guy who already had the worst luck with women. Whatever disaster they were barreling toward served them both right!
Peter knew that was harsh, but those two lovebirds had really mocked him during their last little team-up... No biggie though. He could take a little ribbing from friends. Even if they did make him feel like a third wheel the whole time.
It's not like Spider-Man and the Black Cat were even seeing each other anymore, or that he was under the impression he'd ever been the only guy for her, but come on, DD. From everything Pete had heard from ol' Flamebrain, there was some kind of code, dude. And Miss Hardy was just one more of his exes that'd fallen for the oafish charms of friggin' Flash Thompson. Honestly, The Man Without Fear might be a step up from the kind of guys the Cat usually did all those naughty things with, but of course, these were guys like The Foreigner and Puma. There was even a rumor floating around about Felicia and Wolverine that Pete spent his every waking moment trying not to think about.
And to think, Peter was considering trying to look up another old flame that'd sent him packing... If that was what he could really consider Barbara "Apparently Surnamed" Gordon... He'd never gotten the chance to really get to know her, but he'd felt this spark. And all these years later, he still remembered the feel of that ember glowing in his chest, so yes, sometimes he wondered...
It had started to rain by the time Spider-Man swung home. Peter had this habit of zoning out during the WFSK weather reports that he really needed to kick, but thankfully, he was more damp than soaked when he dropped into his apartment through the skylight. Peter yanked off the gloves as soon as he touched down and dumped the web-shooters shortly thereafter. He'd lied before. He'd only nearly perfected the new web-shooters. With all of the tech he'd integrated in this new design, they were too tight, leaving his wrists all sweaty and clammy. Especially when they got wet. A re-fitting might not be out of the question. Now that the Sinister Six stuff was over, he had time to do that...
Safely at home, he tossed his mask and headed to the kitchen. As he opened his fridge for a bottle of water, it occurred to him that the last woman he'd seen naked in his apartment had been Supergirl...
Maybe he should give Johnny a call. The two of them could go out to a bar or club or something. Maybe Peter could meet a girl with all-new baggage he wasn't aware of. That was the healthy thing to do, right? It's not like he could find a better wingman than the Human Torch...
"Hello, Peter," a voice said behind him.
Startled, he attacked without thinking, making like a Crouching Spider, Hidden Dragon-Man with Unseen Venom Strike only to find his blow countered by King Defends Crown from Throne followed by Frenzied Swarm on Leathery Wings to push him back and Horseman Strikes in the Saddle to further press the advantage. Peter blocked with Silken Thread Snares the Fly (Second Variation), but still took three swift, pointed pokes to his chest before leaping to the ceiling and clinging in an inverted version of Honorable Tarantula Stance where he planned to employ Black Widow's Frightful Kiss on his attacker before his head cleared and he realized he recognized her.
"Barbara?" Peter huffed.
"Sorry if I startled you," the chair-bound redhead apologized between heavy, panting gasps. She appeared almost as phased by their brief fight, but he couldn't help but notice that she was still in the beginning stages of Heavenly Scholar's Rebuke.
Nice, Parker, he admonished himself. Way to unleash the furious fists on the nice lady in the wheelchair...
"What the hell was that?" Barbara asked, still out of breath, looking up at him.
"Um, the Way of the Spider?" he shrugged.
He was going to blame this on his spider-sense. Spider-Man had lost it the night Marla Jameson died, sacrificing it so that the Spider-Slayer's minions didn't have an early warning system that'd help them hurt his fellow Avengers. That had been the plan at least. Spending a few months without it had completely unnerved him. Ten years with something like that will change a person, but Peter had never realized just how much he'd depended on that screwy sixth-sense of his in even the most mundane ways. He knew he complained about the precarious nature of it a lot, but to suddenly find himself bereft had taken a toll on his confidence.
That was the whole reason he'd trained with Shang-Chi. Without his little cheat-sheet of danger, he had to refine his combat methods. Spidey was just beginning to adjust to the idea of a life without the tingles before he got them back in the middle of Spider-Island. The guys and gals at Horizon had used his schematics for the very device that had stolen his spider-sense to create an array that kept all of Manhattan's spider-powered citizens in the city by broadcasting a psycho-arachnoid frequency that shooed them away from the bridges and tunnels. Max realized at one point there was a way to calibrate these spider-jammers to give the original web-head his safety dancing shoes back.
Seriously... Best. Boss. Ever.
That didn't mean Pete wasn't still this jumpy, nervous wreck sometimes, which is probably why he'd been so quick to attack that random voice in his darkened apartment. That was the excuse he was going to give Barbara if she asked, at least...
"You learned kung fu?" she pondered instead, cocking her head.
"Some," he replied from his perch on the ceiling. And then his danger-sense flared for the first time since he'd come home -- a jolt in his head that spread out through his limbs. "Oh nertz," he muttered as his fingers and toes went numb and his powers suddenly faltered. He dropped to the floor in a heap before her.
"I can't feel my spidery bits..." he mumbled into the linoleum.
"Sorry about that," she shrugged. "That should pass in a few minutes." said the nice lady in the wheelchair... who could still totally handle herself, by the way. "Maybe faster considering your enhanced metabolism. Coiled Cobra's Lingering Bite is one of the easier Dim-Mak strikes to shrug off."
Those jabs to his chest he'd failed to fend off... That must have been one of those complex nerve-cluster attacks Shang-Chi swore didn't exist when Spidey had repeatedly asked during their training sessions.
"Well thanks for stunning me gently, I guess," he murmured, trying to stand on rubbery legs. He was about to tell her that if he'd still had his web-shooters on, this would have been different, but now, even his tongue was numb...
"Please, Peter," she insisted, "Give it a moment."
"I'mmmokaaay," he lied in a slur, slumping down and flexing his sluggish arms. "How are you...? How'd you get in here...?"
"I once got Black Canary into Doctor Doom's wine cellar on a bet with Silver Sable, Peter," she sighed. "Sorry, but your apartment wasn't much of a challenge. Please don't take it out on your doorman. Humphrey's a sweetheart."
"Humpees da maaaan," Peter agreed, still shaking things off.
"I'll admit that it certainly helped that your place is surprisingly handi-accessible," Barbara confessed. "Especially for New York City."
There was a reason for that. He had been careful to pick a place that his old pal and former rival Flash could visit without hassle. It was funny. In high school, people would tell Peter, as they helped him up from another noodle incident, that one day soon he'd be a famous scientist in charge of a lab, and Flash Thompson would still just be some jerk. All these years later, and Peter had only just found that big time lab job he'd been promised, while Corporal Eugene Thompson was a venerated war hero twice over who'd lost his legs serving his country.
High school kids don't know shit about the future. Surprise surprise.
Of course, Peter wasn't quite settled enough to explain any of that to his surprise houseguest. Nor had he quite caught his breath yet. "Okay, then, Babsy," he wheezed as evenly as possibly. "Why are you here? I thought you had to rush off for your flight back to Gotham."
"That's the nice thing about taking your boss's private jet," she shrugged. "Flight plans can change. Besides, I figured it was time that we talked..."
TO BE CONCLUDED...
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When Spidey Met Oracle